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  • Christmas Music That Won’t Kill You – Part II: Christmas Past

    The other day I told you about some of the new Christmas CDs this year.  Now we are going to revisit some recommended holiday albums you may have missed in the past.

    Ray Charles – Spirit of Christmas
    Sounds awesome, right?  Nope, it’s merely very good.  It was recorded in the 80s, so it doesn’t have the immediacy of Ray’s recordings for Atlantic.  Pick this up if you’re looking for a big band romp through Christmas classics.  Ray is in great voice and the arrangements are strong.  Really strong if you consider when this was recorded.

    Ringo Starr – Christmas Collection
    This charming CD is pretty rocking in spots.  What record collection is complete without the world’s most famous drummer singing “The Little Drummer Boy?”  With bagpipes!  (Think about it; it makes sense.)

    Christmas Jug Band – Uncorked
    Christmas Jug Band is a collective of SF-area roots musicians.  Although they have released a number of CDs, this is their best because of the strength of the originals.  It’s perfect for people who dig folk, western swing, or skiffle and appreciate a certain kind of humor.  Many of the songs are supposed to remind one of older jazz or string band music, but the humor is modern.  Most humorous music is for kids, and because it talks down to them, it’s toxic to adults.  Christmas Jug Band is more like Peanuts.  The humor really functions at an adult level without excluding children.  If this sounds appealing to you, head over to www.globerecords.com and check out the audio samples.

    Kings College Choir – pretty much anything
    The Mormon Tabernacle Choir might be seen as THE Christmas choir, but Kings College Choir is way better.  Why?  Because the treble parts are sung by pre-pubescent boys instead of women.  You need a bunch of powerful women singers to do Wagner, but that’s just a little too Mall of the Americas for me.  Boys sound like bells or (I almost hate to say it) angels which seems much more appropriate if you are going for a religious experience.  They are all great so pick the one with the carols you like best.  Just be aware that anything subtitled “a lesson and carol service” will be half Bible readings.

    Various Artists – Midwinter
    This amazing 4-CD collection was released by Free Reed, who are known for their comprehensive British folk-rock box sets.  It contains the artist one might expect: Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, The Watersons, Martin Carthy, The Strawbs, Maddy Prior, Shirly Collins, Jethro Tull, etc.  With this bunch, you’re going to get a bunch of really old English songs with possibly pre-Christian roots.  The set also includes some Americans incuding Loudon Wainwright III, Blind Boy Grunt (Bob Dylan, but you knew that right?), Joan Baez, John Fahey, and even Mahalia Jackson.  The few spoken word pieces range from Robert Frost reciting “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening” to an excerpt of The Grinch featuring Vincent Price.

    I could go on but Rock Dad has some crafting responsibilities.  Let’s open this up to comments.  What favorites or guilty pleasures do you have?

    I’ll be back soon with Christmas future.  What the heck could that be?  No idea.

  • Not Necessarily The News – DMB, Prince and (of course) Kanye

    What Would You Say?: If DMB Went Back To Work:
    After a four-year absence from the studio and the loss of saxophonist Leroi Moore, the Dave Matthews Band are soldiering on with a new album and tour. The album is scheduled for release on 4/14, with the tour kicking off in New York on the same day. This new album is produced by Rob Cavallo, who manned the boards for Green Day’s massive “American Idiot” album (speaking of which, where the hell are those guys??). As a veteran of DMB shows numbering into the double digits, I am looking forward to both a new album and tour from these guys. See? I can write something without being smarmy!!

    Photograph by Penner.

    What Will Wendy & Lisa Say?
    In the “I Love His Music, But The Guy’s a Douchebag” department, Prince allegedly revealed himself as a homophobe by saying “God came to Earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out”. Of course, Prince (who, in case you haven’t heard, has been a Jehovah’s Witness for the past several years)’s people denied that he made the statement, but the New Yorker, the magazine in which the statement was published, is standing by the quote. Talk about sticking your foot in your mouth, especially when you’re an artist who has traded in on gay imagery and tons of gay fans for years. I wonder how a cuban heel tastes in your mouth, Mr. Nelson?

    Mr West: Lip Synching?
    So, according to this news clip, the message boards are abuzz, wondering if Kanye lip-synched his “Saturday Night Live”. Folks, find a place somewhere that has the clips of his performance and you tell me if he’s lip-synching, because if I was miming, I’d have made sure the vocals I was miming to sounded a hell of a lot better than Kanye’s did on Saturday night. Kanye fairly obviously used a background singer to hit the high notes he would have otherwise muffed, and the Auto-Tune was in full effect, but anyone with half an ear can tell the dude wasn’t lip synching.

  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #16: Viva Lost Vegans

    STEVE MARTIN  “Grandmother’s Song”  b/w  “Let’s Get Small” (Warner Bros. Records WBS 8503, 1977)

    Novelty songs and comedy records were of no short supply in my house as a kid growing up.  In my Dad’s collection alone, amongst the guitar virtuosos and big western-swing bands, there were scads of 78 RPM platters by the likes of Spike Jones and Kay Kyser’s Kampus Kowboys.  My older brother had the motherlode, of course:  pristine full-length stereophonic LPs of Lenny Bruce, The Smothers Brothers, Woody Allen and Bob Newhart (whose Button-Down Mind we practically memorized;  I can still do the whole “hair-piece” bit), as well as the adult (read: drug-fueled) comedy of Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Cheech & Chong and the incomparable Redd Foxx, who’s still cussing a “blue” streak somewhere, I’m sure.

    My personal favorite was the yellow gatefold double-album from Kermit Schaefer’s Pardon My

    Blooper! series.  What’s more funny to a pre-teen boy than professional broadcasters royally blowing it on-air?  Nothing, that’s what.  (And obviously little has changed, as trillions of YouTubers will testify.)  Hell, I can still crack myself up at any time simply by saying, “Wonder For The Best Bread And Rolls” real fast.  Now that’s entertainment!

    Millions of late-night television viewers fell madly in love with Andy Kaufman and Steve Martin in the mid-’70’s, and I was no exception.  In the years pre-VCR, I would place a cassette recorder in front of the single monaural speaker on my little black & white portable and capture the audio portion of their genius performances on The Tonight Show, NBC’s Saturday Night, Fridays and The Midnight Special for review the next day.  And the next.  And for permanent memorization thereafter.  Kaufman’s bits, being less jokey and more visual, ultimately didn’t translate well to audio.  Martin, however, had by this point crafted the surreal audio joke into an art form.  So if Steve Martin was on Saturday Night Live, I was out in the garage after church Sunday morning, with my brother’s banjo slung around my neck and a prop arrow stuck through my head, doing all the bits.  Most notably this one, where a lovely little “life lesson” ditty quickly descends into a clusterfuck of bestial proportions.

    STEVE MARTIN \”Grandmother\’s Song\” on YouTube

    Learn to play this song, and play it for your kids, nephews, cousins or whatever children you have in your family, and they will adore you forever.  Kids absolutely LOVE this song, especially when they get to sing, “Put a live chicken in your underwear.”  Kids will call it “The Chicken Underwear Song.”  “Play ‘Chicken Underwear’!  Play ‘Chicken Underwear’!” they will scream, and you must oblige, as they have now been exposed to the great surreal masterpiece that is Steve Martin’s “Grandmother’s Song,” and their lives will never be the same.  They will never be sad again, as they can always sing these words and laugh hysterically anytime life gets them down.  I know that’s what I do.

    Side B of this short-but-sweet single provides the title cut from Martin’s 1977 debut LP, Let’s Get Small, from which both these tracks are taken.  Clocking in at a scant 1:24, “…Small” stands as Martin’s classic piss-take on America’s ever-popular drug humor;  simply by changing the word “high” to “small,” Martin becomes a comedian playing a comedian doing a bit about drugs.  Not until Mitch Hedberg slipped in then slipped away did we get a wider bird’s-eye view of the comic brain on drugs.  Since I don’t have a clip of this bit handy, I’ll leave you with this somewhat related, yet significantly more chaotic sketch from the same year, pairing Martin with a different kind of wild-and-crazy guy, The Who’s Keith Moon.

    STEVE MARTIN & KEITH MOON on YouTube

    Steve Martin’s career, which extended beyond standup and into acting, writing and music, is chronicled thoroughly in his best-selling 2007 autobiography, Born Standing Up.

    NEXT WEEK: Four attractive young men from Athens, GA release a single.  And the rest is history.